


Of Stars & Sea

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Birthday Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Secret Relationship, Sensuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 00:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Noctis never asks for much on his birthday. The things he wants can't be wrapped up in silver paper and baked into chocolate cake. To walk the streets with his lover, to enjoy the dark without being alone, to smell the sea and dream in peace are small enough gifts that can't fit in a package. Somehow though, Nyx is able to give him every single one.





	1. Midnight Meandering

**Author's Note:**

> for day one of the nyxnoctweekend event in honor of noct's birthday!

“When’s your birthday?”

“Later.”

Noctis paused to consider that, trying to calculate the vague variable of an answer against the time left in the year. He never was really good at guessing.

“How much later?” he asked again, needling for a clearer answer than “later.”

“Much, _much_ later.”

Noctis huffed in annoyance, toeing off a piece of fallen streamer that hooked itself around his shoe. Nyx stopped walking so Noctis could balance himself on his arm to shake it from his boot.

“So… Like, December later?” Noctis kept asking once he was free from the streamer’s snare.

“Why are we making _your_ birthday about _my_ birthday all of a sudden?” Nyx chuckled, continuing to tug Noctis along on their midnight meandering.

Noctis shrugged. “My birthday’s over. On to the next.”

Nyx smiled and shook his head. “Day’s not over ‘til the clock strikes twelve.”

Noctis snorted in laughter, securing his arms around the crook of Nyx’s elbow. “What am I, a fairytale princess? Waiting for a magic spell at the stroke of midnight?”

“You’re as pretty as one.” Nyx cocked a smirk at him, the slip of his braid over his shoulder framing the quirk of his lips. “Prettier, in fact.”

“Clearly you’ve never met a princess,” Noctis laughed, turning his face away to pretend like he was admiring the storefronts they passed along the boulevard.

Trying to act like Nyx’s silly compliments and sunlight smile didn’t affect him was always an exercise in futility. Nyx always followed it up with something even sillier, dipping his face down to Noct’s ear so only he could hear, “Princes are more my type anyway.”

Noctis piled his shoulder into him, trying to shove him off with a mortified groan. But the link of their arms pulled Noctis with the motion, the two of them swaying in the middle of the street as they walked, scuffing against each other’s shoes like two drunks stumbling through the night.

It was quiet in this part of the city, the ghosts of birthday revelry haunting the golden dark. Streamers coiled like the dragging ends of a wedding dress along the corners of the street, tugged into transit by the late summer wind that smelled like autumn and brought the first speckling of dying leaves with it. Confetti in the colors of the royal family glittered over the cobblestones like freshly fallen rain in the moonlight, metallic fractals of silver and gold, ebony and azure, twinkling beneath the streetlamps.

Black and silver balloons were starting to sag on their strings around the lampposts, baubles of gilded, helium-filled bubbles bumping in the breeze. Pasted to the inside of some shop windows were pictures of himself, posed for the public and with custom frames of well wishes on his birthday – some of them kind of looked like wanted posters to Noct.

The air smelled like damp earth and vanilla frosting; the beginnings of fall on the breeze and the perfume of a bakery further down the street, closed for the evening. Cocktails and pastries and appetizers alike were named in his honor in the darkened windows, all presented in the center of their displays with a “limited time only” card in bold, festive font set below.

For Insomnia, his birthday was a holiday that business owners could capitalize on and conglomerates could close early for on behalf of their weary staff. It was an opportunity to lift the weight of the Empire’s shadow, ever at the edges of the Wall. It wasn’t an official holiday or anything, not a celebration declared by the King himself, demanding tribute for his son on the date of his birth.

It was something the people of the city took upon themselves to celebrate. Noctis wasn’t expected to make a public appearance, no one demanded any ceremony from him, nor did anyone expect an official parade procession or a birthday broadcast or anything nearly so publicized.

It was just an excuse for his people to be happy for a day.

That, in turn, made Noctis pretty happy, too.

And while strangers distracted themselves with novelty goods and drinking games in tribute to him, Noctis could spend his day with the people he knew. The people he loved.

He spent it quiet, and distant from the louder pockets of celebration in the heart of the city – the loudest and brightest being the districts closest to the Citadel, as if by right of proximity they loved the Prince more than the others. Ignis baked him a cake, with creative design input done by Prompto – frosted chocobos on the top that were almost too cute to eat – though not cute enough for Gladio to show them any mercy. He had dinner with his dad, got that new game system that he didn’t even remember mentioning to him, and never would have expected him to remember if he did.

It was good. It was the kind of day he wished could be every one of them. That was all he wanted on his birthday. And now, underneath the shroud of the blissed-out party din, he was free to wander. And pester. And puddle himself against Nyx until he gave in to that pestering.

“Come on, if you don’t tell me, I’m gonna make it an official order for your captain to release that information for the sake of private security.”

“Please,” Nyx scoffed, guiding him around the bend at the corner where the bakery was closed. “You’re too afraid of him to give him an order.”

“Drautos?” Noctis laughed. “He’s a puppy!”

Nyx laughed out right at that, a full-bodied rumble that carried itself into Noct’s ribs, warming his very bones in the cool of the evening. Noctis cozied up to his side and hugged his arm a little tighter.

Wandering with Nyx was all he could have asked for, a simple enough desire that might not have seemed that exciting to an outside observer. But to share his secret where no one could really see it was as much of a thrill to Noctis as the first time they kissed in the hallways of the Citadel, where anyone could have turned the corner, where anyone could have had their ear pressed to the wall Nyx held him against, where anyone could have seen or heard the wanton magic Nyx weaved over him.

“I got you something,” Nyx whispered to him now, as sultry as the summer evenings that had coated Insomnia all throughout August.

Noctis half-expected a kiss, a touch emboldened by the dark, empty alleys off the drowsy street. When he opened his eyes from their dreamy, lidded droop, he was amused, albeit a fair bit confused.

“You got me Crowe’s bike?”

“ _And_ the keys to Crowe’s bike.” Nyx jingled the single key on its dented ring with a self-congratulatory smile.

Noctis gave him a quizzical look, glancing between him and the motorcycle braked against the wall of the bakery. Here he’d thought they’d been wandering with no particular destination in mind, but the clever curl of Nyx’s grin revealed how pleased he was with the placement of the bike, conveniently and discreetly parked out of view from any prying eyes ready to report his kidnapping of the Crown Prince on his birthday.

“You got me a little roadtrip?” Noctis asked, his brain catching up with the rogue smirk on Nyx’s face, contagious to his own.

“If you’re up for it.”

Nyx looped his arm around his waist, guiding Noctis against his chest – a favorite move for both of them, Noctis loving the way he fit up against Nyx, flushed and spaceless and like this cove between his arms was carved out just for him.

“I found us a nice little spot just outside the Wall,” Nyx murmured, like a conspiring assassin in the night, as if there were ears all around them, listening in on their escape plans. All Noct heard was the gentle funneling of the wind down the avenue, the rustle of the confetti around his ankles like autumn leaves. “Quiet, _private_ , just the two of us by the sea for the rest of the night. Whaddya say, birthday boy?”

In the dark, by the sea, with no one else around, just him and Nyx with an engine on loan and hours to kill before sunrise. He took the key himself, rising on his toes to kiss his gratitude into Nyx’s parted lips.

“I say, what are we waiting for?”


	2. Fairytale Cliche

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It might not be much to most. It might be silly, cheesy, but that’s what Noct’s always liked. He’d never admit it, not to anyone else, but this is just the kind of romance he wants on his birthday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for day two of the nyxnoctweekend! disclaimer: cheese puns from a brief google search because I'm not nearly that clever... also warning: lots of cheese puns

“You’re such a cheesy romantic, Nyx Ulric.”

“Only because I’m so fondue you.”

Noctis froze, fear curdling up the back of his neck. “What… no, oh gods, _please_ don’t start…”

“Gotta take the gouda with the bad.”

Noctis groaned, hanging his head in his hands, as if breaking his line of sight to Nyx could somehow separate him from the embarrassing assault of cheese-related puns which he had wrought upon himself with a single word. Nyx squeezed his arms tighter around his waist, barring any means of escape from the flapping strings of cheese he called “comedy.”

“All a part of my _grater_ plan to make you _melt_ ,” he said, the purposely low timbre of his voice doing absolutely nothing by way of seduction when the vocabulary was so, _so_ … munster-ous, _Shiva smite him_ , this man was a blight on his sanity.

Noctis groaned harder, and Nyx chuckled against his throat. “You signed up for this once you started dating me, little king. To havarti and to hold.”

Noctis shook his head, trying to dislodge Nyx’s face from its seat of power at his neck. “That was your worst one yet,” he whined.

“Come on, you don’t really brie-lieve that, do you?”

Noctis threw up his hands and made an exasperated noise that he wished the whole city could hear if it would save him from such abuse. “All I want for my birthday is for you to _stop_.”

“Okay, okay,” Nyx laughed, shifting to offer an apologetic kiss to his cheek. “But just in queso you change your mind…”

Noctis parodied the sounds of sobbing and nuzzled his face beneath Nyx’s chin in the hopes that he would take pity on him, spare him, _anything_ not to suffer this madness of mozzarella-themed misery he was subjecting him to.

It _was_ cheesy, whether Nyx was packing puns for the occasion or not. Cheesy in that clichéd yet coveted way of romantic B-movies filmed for TV, with the perfect view, the perfect lighting – stars so bright and varied and _too_ perfect to be real, surely they couldn’t be nearly as perfect in person as the green screen illusions he was so familiar with – and the impossibly untouched earth, so flat and untrodden and yet somehow bearing the perfect height of grass for them to sprawl half-concealed in, somehow measuring the perfect levels of sea wind to lap over the high fronds, as if it was all manufactured by a film crew to capture for all time.

Nature and Nyx were better directors than half of the movies he’d watched when he was awake late and pining for love in his darker hours. Nyx built a little lean-to tent when they arrived, constructed of old sheets and knitted blankets on the knoll over-looking the sea. He left it open to the ocean, with three hanging walls to ward off the late night chill, shifting with the subtle patterns of the salty air rolling up from the waves. He’d even packed a midnight picnic, the dork – though Noctis had a feeling Ignis might have had a hand in that, or maybe Libertus, or maybe Nyx really was better at planning ahead than his “impulsive behavior” might have indicated on his disciplinary reports.

“Here,” Noctis said, picking out the wine bottle from the beat up old basket that had been strapped to the back of Crowe’s bike as they left the city. “Chase down your cheeses and be quiet.”

Wine in a hand basket, a tent by the sea, motorcycle rides before midnight, _Six_ , it was so country, so old school, so overdone in all the movies, and yet never done in real life. It was goofy, maybe, but it was sweet. It was what he wanted that he’d never admit, what he would always be too afraid to ask for out loud.

It was all Nyx. Stupid and soft, old and new, secret and just within sight if anyone could be bothered to open their eyes, and damn them for judging if they did.

Noctis liked the simple things. He liked a simple life. He liked spending his birthday on the fringes of the public eye, blurring into the city lights that had bled past him on the back of the motorcycle. He liked the anonymity of the helmet over his eyes, of watching the shadows of strangers laughing in the dark from within the slipstream of funneled air in his ears, of streaks of streetlights made into party ribbons at the edges of his vision. He liked being unseen, to be a stranger in a city where everyone was expected to recognize his face, where his colors were in every flutter of confetti that whipped behind the exhaust fumes of the bike.

He liked the cloak of the sea-sounds beyond him now, the privacy of the dark just outside the Wall, where his title was at his back, Nyx’s chest between him and the Crown he left within the border behind him.

“Y’know,” Nyx mused, after a measured drink of wine too sweet for his tastes, but perfect for Noct’s – which he let him know with a contented purr as a shared slug of it warmed his belly. “While torturing you with cheese puns is a great use of my time” – Noctis scoffed in disagreement – “I don’t think we’re taking the best advantage of our privacy, do you?”

It was asked in a baritone whisper, with no hint of irony that might concede the approach of another awful pun to grate on Noct’s ears. Even with no one else around, even when it was just the black glass of the ocean to hear him, rippling with the slivered light of the moon seated above the invisible line where the night sky met the sea, even when it was just the two of them, he still talked to him like they were still in danger of discovery. He still talked to him like he was an explicit secret, like they were back in that hallway of the Citadel, down that alley a few blocks from his apartment, in the elevator up to Noct’s, just around that bend, just behind that wall, risking the risqué touch and sound of desires they weren’t supposed to share.

He liked that.

He liked the danger of being in Nyx’s arms as much as he loved the safety of it. Like no matter what happened, no matter who might see or scoff, he was secure here, right where he fit between Nyx’s arms, his thighs, back to chest, legs entwined and lips along his throat, bared to the moonlight that chased so much of the world inside after dark. He felt bolder than he did in the day, bold enough to tease and torture the Kingsglaive’s most fearsome fighter at the risk of cutting himself on his tempered edges.

“Nope,” Noctis said, on a sigh that didn’t agree with the word, as Nyx’s arms squeezed and teeth closed on his tender flesh in anticipation of the rejection. “Mood ruined,” Noctis persisted, in a stronger voice. “Too much cheese.”

“You can never have too much cheese,” Nyx protested, in careless dulcet caresses of breath up and down Noct’s neck, gently taking apart his defenses with every lift and press of his lips. “Did I indulge you a little too much, Your Highness?”

“Too much cheese is bad for you,” Noctis insisted, testing his own limits with a sharp intake of air and a bite to his bottom lip when Nyx’s hands started to move with his lips, teasing cool fingertips beneath the hem of his shirt, quickly warming in the dips of his abdomen, as if ignited by his very skin.

“Said someone who knows they’re lying to themselves,” Nyx chuckled, halfway in serious defense of cheese lovers everywhere and halfway in an innuendo as he pressed Noctis back deeper, palms flat against his torso and _warm_ like coals before the fire was lit.

Self-control was something he was learning to let go of when it came to Nyx. It was the only time he let himself give it up, let Nyx make of him what he would, let himself ride the currents of his heat and his patience and not care about what was expected of him. He only wanted one thing from him though, and since it was his birthday, he thought he was entitled to make at least one request.

Noctis took Nyx’s hands to still them, his breaths already straining on a staccato rhythm. He turned his face against Nyx’s laving lips, growing more earnest and eager and driving Noct’s pulse higher with every kiss. Nosing against the rough cut of his hair along the side of his head, just beneath the coil of his braid that Noctis was eager to tug and tease him with, he asked,

“Slow?”

Nyx met his eyes with a hooded look, the gray-blue irises as bright as the moonlight on the sea, just barely misted with the salt off the waves. His very own storm on the horizon, his ghost of a tempest thundering in the distance; dangerous and safe. Nyx smiled, and his roaming hands followed his Prince’s command in an instant, dragging a lazy course along his skin to calm the blood burning between them.

“Until the last stroke of midnight,” Nyx promised him, teased him with the slide of his scruffy chin against the shell of his ear. “And well beyond that.”

Noctis giggled as he was crowded underneath the cover of the tent. Fairytale clichés and midnight picnics, so dumb, so cheesy, and Noctis would eat it all up like a birthday feast fit for a storybook king. Life imitates art, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> feedback is greatly appreciated! let me know if I'm treating the best boy right with Nyx's lovely, lavishing attention


	3. Last Stroke of Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just before midnight, on the last steps of his birthday, Noctis gets one last gift. It comes in his dreams.

He dreamt about a magic cake.

He ate it at the top of the lighthouse, on the cliffs of a phantom place he thought he might have dreamed up as a child. It was familiar in the odd, aching way that déjà vu was familiar: not quite remembered, but recognized, like a long forgotten dream that just slipped back beneath the folds of his consciousness.

He was a child, and his father sat across from him at the little fold-out table. His father was younger here, like Noctis remembered him being when he was small. His hair was raven black, untarnished by the grays of the Ring, his eyes sharper and warmer and hopeful, and he sat without a stoop to his shoulders, like Noctis so often saw him do when he sat on the throne nowadays.

Luna was there, too, but he didn’t recognize her at first. She was older than him, much older than she was when he’d last seen her – and taller, much taller, she was always so much taller – and she was wreathed in a silver dress made from moonlight. It was the same color as the familiar creature that sat by his hand, ruby horn glowing warmly in the noonday sun that was cresting down into the sea below.

Carbuncle nosed at the shimmering, sugary confection at the center of the table, shiny black nose curling critically over every detail, every strawberry swirl and gold-dusted tip, every star-shaped piece of fruit, every white chocolate ribbon, and meringue moogle.

The swirls on the sides _moved_ , mixed flavors of strawberry and blueberry and ulwaat berries shifting like river water around the circular base. They made shapes the longer Noctis stared, chocobos racing along tendrils of blue, moogles dancing on platforms of pink, stars shooting like rockets along yellow streamers.

His phone popped with its distinct alert at his other hand, a trumpet of confetti bursting in the little message viewer.

_“Didn’t think you’d be awake so late,”_ the message said. _“I would have been here sooner if you’d slept… But I wouldn’t miss your birthday for Shiva’s summer ice cream!”_

The message was framed with stars and hearts and chocobo emojis, birthday candles and firework sparks. His faithful friend sat down next to him, fluffy tail brushing the top of his hand.

When Noctis blinked, plates full of cake appeared on the table, perfect, triangle slices of chocolate and vanilla set before him. When he glanced at the dancing cake itself, no pieces were cut from the carousel of colors. That made him smile – he’d always thought it was so sad to see a perfect cake cut into and destroyed.

Regis and Luna were quiet, but smiling as the four of them – Carbuncle had to have the cake and eat it too – shared sweets and sea air and a song without any source – a perky, festive tune of flutes and accordions, gentle, yet lively. They didn’t talk, but Noctis didn’t mind the silence.

All he really wanted was the company.

There was no way to measure time in the dream. He could have been eating cake for minutes, or for days. There was no way to know, his tongue dancing with the tastes of vanilla and chocolate and bright bursts of berries, velvety cream in-between the layers, a touch of magic in every taste, indefinable, but incandescent in flavor.

He only knew he was finished when Ignis appeared.

He was thirteen, just beginning to grow up, dressed in a nice suit that could have only fit his wiry, adolescent body in a dream. Without looking at himself, Noctis somehow knew he was as old as Ignis was now. When he stood up from the table, he wasn’t eight anymore, but twelve, and his clothes had changed to match what Ignis was wearing.

“Are you ready, Noct?” Ignis asked, smiling at the edge of the lighthouse.

“Ready for what?” he asked.

“For the world, of course.”

Ignis took his hand and walked off the edge of the lighthouse. But where gravity should have sent them both plummeting to their deaths, one step merely took Noctis down to ground level, as simple as stepping through a door.

And when they walked, they were in what he knew to be Altissia, from brochures and TV shows and news broadcasts and vacations when he was very young.

It was nighttime, and the streets were full of laughter and light, the lampposts holding a full moon for every bulb. It was as bright as daylight on the streets, but he could see the stars as clearly overhead as if there was no light at all.

Ignis held his hand and led him through the city, talking about every little architectural marvel they passed by. For all that the alleys were crowded with strangers, somehow the two of them were never bumped into, or stepped on, or had no space to move. It was as if the whole city was emptied just for them to explore, making it easy to find the statue in the middle of the square.

Leviathan was alive, the metal structure of her statue twisting to look down at them as they approached. She lowered her head to the cobblestones, and Noctis almost ran away if Ignis hadn’t been so bold as to take a step and _stand on her_. Noctis gaped at him, feeling his face heat up when Ignis laughed.

“Come on, Noct! We won’t get a better view than this.”

He offered his hand again, and when Noctis stepped onto Leviathan, she lifted her head to the sky.

And suddenly, they were surrounded by stars. Noctis could reach out to the darkness and pluck a star from the sky, they were so close. He did, in fact, taking each one between thumb and forefinger like ornaments from a tree. Each star he took, Ignis told him a story. And again, time passed and didn’t pass at all as they sat on top of the dragon and mapped the sky with stories.

He only knew it was time to go when he heard Gladio calling him from down in the city below.

Once more, Noctis was older to fit the age of his friend – sixteen and low-voiced and grown into himself. Gladio was telling him to jump and Noctis heard himself scream, “Are you crazy?”

Then, Ignis – who was also older now – did a very un-Ignis-like thing, and pushed him between the shoulders until he was falling. He said, “Tally-ho!” like some elite Tenebraen hunter from a bygone era.

One second, Noctis was falling. The next, he was standing in the street, the stars far above him and Leviathan motionless as the statue she was meant to be. Ignis was standing next to him as Gladio wrapped an arm around his shoulders and led them all towards the canal, where the stars he’d picked out for Ignis to catalogue had fallen beneath the water.

They moved in streaks of light, shaped like the scales of fish. Gladio handed him a fishing pole from nowhere, and told him he could catch as many as he wanted. “Just catch a big one,” Gladio said, ruffling his hair in his big, calloused hand. “Make it worth our while.”

The three of them sat on the edge of the canal as Noctis fished, feet dangling just above the water – in Gladio’s case, his long legs sunk his feet completely in, and he swirled them around with the innocent fascination of a child Noctis had never met him as before.

Noctis caught stars and moonlight and fish that didn’t exist, patterned like paintings he’d seen in museums. Some looked like gardens, some like skies, some like the ocean, and some like the skyline of Insomnia. He had to keep them all, Gladio said he could. Every catch he reeled in, his friends cheered for him and admired his work, the two of them puzzling over the patterns in the scales while Noctis recast.

The “big one” nearly pulled him into the water if Gladio hadn’t wrapped his arm around his waist and pulled him back. The strain on the line was more insistent than any fish Noctis had ever hooked before, as if it was pulling _back_. It took both Ignis and Gladio to help him reel it in, pulling him away from the dock until the end of the line was pulled from the water.

Noctis was dumbstruck when it was Prompto he pulled up on the end of the hook.

“Ooooowwwww!” Prompto whined, skidding onto the canal edge and untangling the fishing hook from the back of his collar. “You should really be more considerate about that, you know. Fish have feelings!”

He was eighteen, and when Noctis looked around at the others, they all were, too. Gladio was fully-tattooed in the eagle of the Amicitias, Ignis had finally settled on a hairstyle he liked, swept up from his brow so he could better see all the intricacies he often set himself to achieving. Prompto was skinny and stylish, wringing saltwater from his vest and shaking his hair like a soaked dog.

He was dry in a second though, and hooked his arm through Noct’s to take him back into the city. “C’mon, buddy! We’ve got dancing to do!”

“Dancing?”

Noctis was sure that meant this dream was turning into a nightmare.

Where the boulevard had been full of flower shops and bakeries a moment ago, turning onto it now, it was the darkened interior of a night club. Neon lights of purples and greens skated across the writhing bodies of dancers in feathered costumes. There were people dressed as chocobos, people dressed in Moogle suits, shimmying from foot to foot in some facsimile of a dance, there were people wearing behemoth horns, and people painted like cactuars. Some were even the creatures themselves, no costume needed to disguise themselves.

“Come on, dude! This is your song!”

Noctis recognized it as a tune that had been stuck in his head all day long. Not necessarily his favorite, but nevertheless, he felt his body start to move amidst the crowd of costumes and creatures. His friends were never lost amongst the dancers like he was afraid they would be, abandoning him to a group of strangers in the dark. They danced with moogles that never touched the ground, bobbing in midair and doing backflips onto Prompto’s shoulders. Cactuars twirled and chocobos kweh’d and Noctis was tickled by feathers and fluff on all sides.

He was laughing so hard he could have cried when Prompto took his shoulders and sent him spinning. In the whirlwind of colors and sounds, he saw his friends waving to him, smiling, and someone saying, “Stick close to me, Noct. Don’t want you to get lost.”

When the world stopped spinning and the music silenced, it was Nyx that was dancing with him.

He caught him on the tail end of the spin, enveloping him into his arms to waltz along the empty avenue. Except it wasn’t Altissia anymore. It was Insomnia, as it had been earlier in the night. But now there were frozen stars floating at eye level, golden feathers and blue confetti shaped like leaves drifting in lazy circuits all around them. The street was aglow with silver light, the moon hanging between the buildings. And at the end of the street he could see the ocean, where the skyline was supposed to be.

It was silent and dark and Nyx held him close, swaying to a song that neither of them could hear. The world was in suspended animation, barely moving, and it was just the two of them, dancing in the middle of the street.

Noctis was twenty now, maybe a little older in his dreams. Nyx was the same as the day he fell in love with him – older than him, but a child at heart, a boy in the soft slant of his smile and a man in the hard cut of his eyes, as smooth as the edge of blade. They only blunted when they looked at him, softening like stormclouds out to sea, like the halo haze of mist around the moon.

“You’re happy,” Nyx said, suddenly, a thumb stroking along the tilt of Noct’s lips.

He was smiling. He hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d eaten cake at the top of the lighthouse.

He was standing on Nyx’s toes, his arms around his neck, and letting Nyx do the moving, following steps that had no frame, listing from side to side, body held flush to his, melding together like there was no such thing as space, and in this world that Carbuncle had created for him, there might as well not have been.

Noctis felt so close that he could leave his skin and vanish into Nyx. He didn’t feel like he was made of blood and bone. He felt like starlight, like cloud puffs, like saltwater under moonlight. He felt unbound, weightless, floating, and it took him a moment to realize that they really were.

He held onto Nyx as they rose off the city street, rising and rising above the skyscrapers until they were standing in the moon over the sea.

He could see all of Eos from up here. Altissia a silver swipe of color, Insomnia dark and blue on the water, even Galahd, a russet swath of islands nestled into the dark sea. He hung off of Nyx like the stars that had hung without strings all around him, trusting his arms around his waist not to let him go.

Even if they did, he wasn’t afraid to fall this time. Because he knew Nyx would dive into the ocean with him. He was only afraid to fall if he was alone.

“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” Noctis told him, confided like a secret, even this high above the world.

He pushed his face against Nyx’s neck and hummed in contentment when he felt him rest his chin in his hair. More time that had no time passed just like that. The two of them, above the world, one with the sky and with the sea to catch them.

The full moon turned into the face of a clock. And as they danced through the stars, the hands struck twelve. A low gong tolled across the ocean, the slow, inexorable proof of time passing once again.

When he opened his eyes, he thought he was still in the dream. Because all he saw was sky and sea and Nyx. But the sky was starting to fade from black to blue, violets and pinks and the grays of the sea at dawn. He felt the wind rising in his hair, hissing through the grass, flapping at the sheets of the tent. He felt the heat of Nyx’s bare chest against his nose, felt the rise and fall of his breaths beneath his ear.

The clock had struck midnight a long time ago.

He was awake, and for once it wasn’t with regret. Because the world outside of his dreams was finally as perfect as the one within.

From the corner of his sleep-blurred vision, he saw the red dot of a notification blinking on his phone. It was Ignis, he thought, already burrowing his face into Nyx’s skin to pretend like it wasn’t there. It was someone wondering when he was coming back, someone determined to drag him back to the dregs of reality that weren’t nearly as nice as this one.

Hand feeling heavy as a bowling ball, he resigned himself to the tug of the light. And his chest softened when he recognized the emoji code of the message that only he could read.

_“Happy birthday, Noct! I couldn’t give you everything this year, because, well, you already have it! See you in your dreams!”_

_Then I should see you when I wake up_ , Noctis thought, snuggling close to Nyx and humming when he felt his arm curl instinctively around his shoulders. _Because this is a dream come true._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the final, free day of the nyxnoct birthday weekend event! very self-indulgent, I know, but I just really wanted Noct to be overly happy for his birthday weekend. it might have been a bit much, but if you have a sweet tooth, I hope you enjoyed this little tribute to the birthday boy!

**Author's Note:**

> this is going to be such a self-indulgent weekend of super-sized fluff for the birthday boy, fair warning for cavities in advance. if you need me to cover your dental expenses, let me know in a comment! and spread the best boy's birthday love <3


End file.
